You do Justice Thomas a great disservice
in your editorials by continuing to make the point that he would not have
gotten where he is without affirmative action programs to help him
along the way. Your assertion would only have meaning if there were an
actual federal program of support to the concept of putting
minorities at the head of a line. As far as I can tell, the only programs that
helped Clarence Thomas move along were practices of the college
admission at Yale to identify promising black students and give them extra
weight atop their SAT or LSE scores. There is no evidence that Justice Thomas
would have been barred from Yale Law School if he were white, but even if
there was extra weight given his application because of his blackness, that
affirmative action would be proper. The kind of affirmative action that
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas resists is that which requires
by government influence a place at the head of the line.

Take my own experience as a young man at
Brooklyn College in 1954 trying to enter UCLA in the sophomore class. My
freshman grades at Brooklyn were okay, but in my third semester, while my
application at UCLA was being considered, I got sick, needed a minor
operation, and wound up with a straight “C” average in my course work. The
admissions officer at UCLA notified me that I had been accepted despite the
“C” average because there was a regular program to diversify the student body
with out-of-staters, and the fact I was from Brooklyn weighed in my favor. Who
knows? I might have bumped a black with better grades.

Your complaint about Justice Thomas’s
speech before the all-black National Bar Association can rest on all the other
grounds you mentioned, and while I would disagree, I would still say you have
a legitimate point. On this one point, you are off base. Justice Thomas is
where he is because at various points of his life people who helped him
overlooked his blackness just as UCLA overlooked by “C” average, and
correctly saw that an addition to the intellectual portfolio would benefit by
his inclusion. My own information is that President George Bush saw it in
exactly these terms after having met Clarence Thomas in his days at the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission. Bush appointed Thomas to the Court of
Appeals only when his advisors insisted he had to have some time on that
slightly lower court. Thomas was not named to “the black seat” vacated by
Justice Thurgood Marshall, in the sense that President Bush had made up his
mind to name Thomas to the Court when the next seat opened up. Because Justice
Marshall let it be known that he would not retire until a Democrat was
elected, it was most likely that Clarence Thomas would be named when Justice
Harry Blackmun retired. Perhaps having been informed of President Bush’s
intentions in this regard, Justice Marshall announced his retirement, which
made it appear that Thomas was getting the “black seat.” When Bush said
Clarence Thomas was the most qualified to hold that vacant seat, he
meant it genuinely, in the sense that the Court had an enormous vacuum because
it did not have a man of Thomas’s blackness and perspective.

Your editorialist, who I assume is black,
should think his/her opinion through from this angle. It is not wrong for you
to think that the federal government and our Supreme Court Justices should be
in the business of mandating affirmative action of one sort or another. The
other point of view also has legitimacy. Justice Thomas should not be
criticized for having a legitimate constitutional viewpoint opposed by the
Times because someone, sometime, helped him above others. Everyone of
us at one time or another has benefitted by the affirmative action of someone
else.